The SAT Prep Black Book

SAT Writing Multiple Choice

Overview and Important Reminders for Identifying Sentence Errors On The SAT

Like the rest of the Writing questions, the Identifying Sentence Errors questions on the SAT test a limited number of concepts over and over. But, as I mentioned earlier, these questions are purely about SAT grammar, with no consideration of style. These questions are also unique in that they don’t ask you to rephrase anything—they’re only interested in your ability to identify bad SAT grammar. You don’t have to worry about fixing any of the problems you see.

Each of these questions will present you with a single sentence. Several of the words and phrases in the sentence will be underlined. Your job is to find the part of the sentence that contains an error according to the SAT’s idea of grammar. If any one of the underlined portions of the sentence contains something that the SAT considers to be bad grammar, you’re going to mark it as the correct answer choice. If nothing is grammatically wrong with the sentence according to the College Board’s rules of grammar, you’ll mark (E).

You’ll find that the same handful of issues accounts for a majority of the question. Things will start to seem very repetitive after you practice a little bit. So let’s get started!